I like the idea of Wv3 being server based. Unfortunately, I suspect that that is causing a lot of the issues people are having.
By associating Wv3 with a players home server, we get the ability to give rewards to that server based upon its performance etc, which in turn provides more meaning to the PvP’s in addition to the reward of winning against other players. This is all very elegant, however, it does cause the problem we are seeing. Players from the same locales tend to play on the same server as it makes pugging etc much simpler and for some of us, gives sense of more of a local community (e.g. on SoS, you do tend to feel you are representing the Oceanic region).
Unfortunately, this does not translate well to balancing playing times in server vs server matchups.
Given the name of this game is Guild Wars 2, I would have expected more guild-based Wv3. Getting a little off-topic with that, but it does have some vague relevance
Perhaps we could move to more of a ‘Team’ model. i.e. we form Wv3 teams. Whether you form your team from your server pop, or from multiple servers would be irrelevant. You limit the number of players per team allowable in Wv3 at any one time to some arbitrary number (I’m sure ANet have some idea about the number of people they think would work best per side in Wv3 give nteh map size), which may vary over time as ANet adjust it based on a bit of analysis. Let say (for the sake of having a number) that this is 280 people per team in Wv3 at any one time.
Total team size is entirely up to the Team Leaders (or should I say Guild??). But it would also behoove any team (if they want to be competitive) to make sure they had enough players to have full coverage 24×7. Perhaps the current reward system could also be applied to all team members who have participated in the current match (for some minimum amount of time or not at all, might have to look at ways to stop abuse of that tho).
The downside to this, is that you lose Server based affiliations, which I think are very useful and tie in well, and new players or players who wanted to dabble in Wv3 to see what it is all about would not have such easy access (tho, there would be nothing stopping them from joining a team or starting a new one – but I know some players are very shy and would be turned off by this).
Some of the existing issues such as supply-wasting would become easier to manage – allowing the ‘team leader’ to disable access to keep/tower supplies or functions etc or even kicking them from the team (not sure about this with regards to power mongering). Even, just allowing the team leader to kick people would solve that issue. Spying would still work (which I think is good for the game but once discovered, at least the spy could be dealt with, in fact, it would be fantastic to see something implemented around imprisoning said spy – locking them out of the game for a day unless they pay the team a ransom etc…anyway, getting off topic again
We’d get less idiocy going on (well, be able to do something about it at least) – griefing in puzzles would be more policy-based, rather than individual choice – most of the time, I leave other players alone in there, as I would prefer to be left alone in there as well. However, there are many times where it would be much better if I didn’t. If I’m really honest, I leave them alone because I am hopeless at the jump puzzles ( I blame it on screen lag due to my on-board-intel non-gaming-card lol low graphics settings ftw!).
[Note] Moved this here as it is off-topic for the night-capping thread